Copyright 1986 by Walter Jon Williams Chapter One

"Don't go with a thatch. Please."

He pauses at the door, hand on the jamb. "What's the difference?" he asks. "Going with a

thatch, or living with you?"

The door closes and Sarah can only stand and fight a helpless war with her anger and

tears. She spins and stalks into her room. Her hardwired nerves are crackling, the adrenaline

triggering her reflexes, and she only stops herself from trying to drive a fist through the wall.

She can taste death on her tongue, and wants to run the Weasel as fast as she can.

The holograph of Princess sits on her chest of drawers. She takes it and stares at it;

seeing the creamy shoulders, the blue innocence in the eyes, an innocence as false as Daud's.

TOMORROW/NO

Sarah and Princess follow the ambulance men out of the Aujourd'Oui. They are carrying the girl from the washroom stall. She has clawed her cheeks and breasts with her fingernails. Her face is a swollen cloud of bruises, her nose blue pulp; her lips are split and bloody. She is still

trying to weep, but lacks the strength.

Sarah can see Princess's excitement glittering in her eyes. This is the touch of the world

she craves, warm and sweaty and real, flavored with the very soil of old Earth. Princess stands on

the hot sidewalk, while her dirtboys circle and call for the cars. Sarah puts her arm around her

and whispers in her ear, telling her what Sarah knows she wants. "I am your dream. "

"My name is Danica," Princess says.

In the back of the car there is a smell of sweat and expensive scent. Sarah begins to

devour Danica, licking and biting and breathing her in. She left the silicon spray at home but

won't be needing it: Danica has Daud's eyes and hair and smooth flesh, and Sarah finds herself

wanting to touch her, to make a feast of her.

The car passes smoothly through gates of hardened alloy, and they are in the nest. None of

Cunningham's people ever got this far. Danica takes Sarah's hand and leads her in. A security man

insists on a check: Sarah looks down at him with a contemptuous stare and spreads the wings of her

jacket, letting his electronic marvel scout her body: She knows Weasel is undetectable by these

means. The boy confiscates her hardfire inhaler. Fine: it is made so as not to acquire

fingerprints. "What are these?" he asks, holding up the hard black cubes of liquid crystal, ready

for insertion into a comp deck.

"Music," she says. He shrugs and gives them back. Princess takes her hand again and leads

her up a long stair.

Her room is soft and azure. She laughs and lies back on sheets that match her eyes, arms

outstretched. Sarah bends over and laps at her. Danica moans softly, approving. She is an old man

and a powerful one, and Sarah knows this game. His job is to rape Earth, to be as strong as

spaceborn alloy, and it is weakness that is his forbidden thing, his pornography. To put his

bright new body into the hands of a slave is a weakness he wants more than life itself.

"My dream," Danica whispers. Her fingers trace the scars on Sarah's cheek, her chin.

Sarah takes a deep breath. Her tongue retracts into Weasel's implastic housing, and the

cybersnake's head closes over it. She rolls Danica entirely under her, holding her wrists, molding

herself to the old man's new girl body. She presses her mouth to Danica's, feeling the flutter of

the girl's tongue, and then Weasel strikes, telescoping from its hiding place in Sarah's throat

and chest. Sarah holds her breath as her elastic artificial trachea constricts. Danica's eyes open

wide as she feels the touch of Weasel in her mouth, the temperature of Sarah's body but somehow

cold and brittle. Sarah's fingers clamp on her wrists, and Princess gives a birth-strangled cry as

Weasel's head forces its way down her throat. Her body bucks once, again, her breath warm in

Sarah's face. Weasel keeps uncoiling, following its program, sliding down into the stomach, its

sensors questing for life. Daud's eyes make desperate promises. Princess moans in fear, using his

strength against Sarah's weight, trying to throw her off. Sarah holds him crucified. Weasel,

turning back on itself as it enters Danica's stomach, tears its way out, seeks the cava inferior

and shreds it. Danica makes bubbling sounds, and though Sarah knows it is impossible, although she knows her tongue is still retracted deep into Weasel's base, Sarah thinks she can taste blood.

Weasel follows the vein to Danica's heart. Sarah holds her down, her own chest near bursting with

lack of air, until the struggling stops and Daud's blue eyes grow cloudy and die.

Purple and black rim Sarah's vision. She heaves herself off the bed, partly retracting

Weasel as she gasps for air through the constricted passage in her throat. She stumbles for the

washroom, falls and crashes into the sink. The impact drives the air from her. Her hands turn the

spigots. Her hands put Weasel in the sink and feel the water running chill. Her breath comes in

rasps. Weasel is coated with a gel that supposedly prevents blood and matter from adhering, but

she doesn't want even a chance of Danica's flesh in her mouth. The cybersnake is tearing at her

breast. The water thunders until she can feel nothing but the speed with which she is falling into

blackness, and then she falls back and sucks Weasel into her and can breathe again and taste the

cool and healing air.

Her chest heaves up and down, and her eyes are still full of darkness. She knows Daud is

dead and that she has a task. She whips her head back and forth and tries to clear it, tries to

scrabble upward from the brink, but Weasel is eating her heart and she can scarcely think from the

pain. Sarah can hear herself whimper. She can feel the prickle of the carpet against the back of

her neck as she raises her arms above her head and tries to drag herself along, crawling away,

crawling, while Weasel throbs like thunder in her chest and she thinks she can hear her heart

crack.

her back and the water is still roaring in the sink. She sits up and clutches at her throat.

Weasel, having fed, is at rest. She crawls back to the sink and turns the spigots off. Grasping

them, she hauls herself to her feet. She still has work to do.

In her room, Princess is spread-eagled on the bed. Dead, it is easier to see the old man

in her. Sarah's stomach turns over. She should drag Princess across the bed and tuck her under the

covers, delaying the moment when they find her, but she can't bring herself to touch the cooling

flesh; and instead she turns her eyes away and steps into the next room.

She pauses as her eyes adjust to the dim light, and listens to the house. Silence. She

reads the amber lights above her vision, and can find only routine broadcasts. Sarah takes a pair

of gloves from her belt pouch and walks to the room's comp deck. She flicks it on, then opens the

trapdoor and takes from her pouch one of the liquid-crystal music cubes Cunningham has given her.

She puts it in the trapdoor and waits for the deck to signal her.

The cube would, in fact, have played music had anyone else used it. Sarah has the code to

convert it to something else. The READY signal appears.

She taps the keys in near-silence as she enters the codes. A pale light flashes in the

corner of the screen: RUNNING. She leans back in her chair and sighs.

Princess was a courier, bringing from orbit a liquid-crystal cube filled with complex

instructions, instructions her company dared not trust even to coded radio transmissions. Princess

would not have known what she carried, though presumably it contained inventory data, strategies

for manipulating the market, instructions to subordinates, buying and selling strategies.

Information worth millions to any competitor. The crystal cube would have been altered to a new

configuration once the information was removed to the company computer-a computer sealed against any outside tampering, but which could presumably be accessed through the terminals in the

corporate suites.

Sarah also has no clear idea what is on the cube she is carrying. Some kind of powerful

theft program, she presumes, to break its way through the barriers surrounding the information so

that it can be copied. She does not know how good her program is, whether it's setting off every

alarm in Florida or whether it's accomplishing its business stealthily. If it's very good, it will

not only copy the information, but alter it as well, planting a flow of disinformation at the

heart of the enemy code, perhaps even altering the instructions as well, sabotaging the enemy's

marketing patterns.

While the RUNNING light blinks, Sarah stands and goes over every part of the suite she

might have touched, stroking anything that could retain a print with her gloved fingertips. The

house, and Princess, are silent.

It is eleven minutes before the computer signals READY. Sarah extracts the cube and

returns it to her belt. She has been told to wait a few hours, but there is someone dead in the

next room and every nerve screams at her to run. She sits before the comp deck and puts her head

between her legs, gulping air. For some reason she finds herself trembling. She battles the

adrenaline and her own nerves, and thinks of the tickets, the cool dark of space with the blue

limb of Earth far below, forever out of reach.

In two hours she calls a cab and walks down the cold, echoing stair. The security man nods

at her as she walks out: his job is to keep people from coming in, not to hinder their leaving. He

even gives her the inhaler back.

She takes a dozen cabs to a dozen different places, leaving the satin jacket in one,

cinching her waist in tighter and removing the suspenders in another, in a third reversing her T-

shirt and her belt pouch, both now glowing yellow like a warning light. The jockey persona is

gone, and she is dirt again. She finishes her journey at the Plastic Girl, the place still running

flat-out at four in the morning. As she enters, the sounds of dirt life assault her, and she takes

comfort. This is her world, and she knows all the warm places where she can hide.

She takes a room in the back and calls Cunningham. "Come and get your cube," she says, and then orders rum and lime.

By the time he arrives, she's rented an analyzer and some muscle. He comes in alone, a

package in his hand. He closes the door behind him.

"Princess?" he asks.

"Dead."

what you've got," she says.

She checks three vials at random and the analyzer tells her it's chloramphenildorphin,

purity 98 percent or better. She smiles. "Take your cube," she says, but he plugs it into the

room's deck first, making sure it has what he wants. Then he puts it in his pocket and heads for

the door.

"If you have another job," she says, "you know where to find me."

He pauses, a hand on the knob. His eyes, flicker. She receives an impression of sadness

from him, as if he were mourning something newly dead.

He is an earthly extension, Sarah knows, of an Orbital bloc. She doesn't even know which

one. He is a willing tool and an obedient one, and she has fed him her scorn on that account, but

that doesn't disguise what they both know-that she would give all the contents of the packet, and

everything else besides, if she could have his ticket, and on the same terms.

"I'll be on the ramp in an hour," he says. "Going back to orbit. "

She gives him a grin. "Maybe I'll be seeing you there," she says.

He nods, his eyes on hers. He starts to say something, then turns himself off again, as if

he realizes it's pointless. "Be careful," he says, and leaves without another glance. One of her

hired muscle looks in at her.

"It's clear," she says. The muscle nods.

She looks at the fortune in her hand and feels suddenly hollow. There is a vacuum in her

chest where the joy should be. The drink she has ordered tastes as flat as barley water, and a

headache throbs in time to the LED light burning in her forehead. She pays off her hired muscle

and takes a cab to an all-night bank, where she deposits the endorphin in a rented box. Then she

takes the cab home.

The apartment hums softly, emptily. She finds the control to her LED and turns it off,

then throws her clothing in the trash. Naked, she steps into her room and sees the holo of

Princess on her night table. Hesitantly, she reaches out to it, then turns it face down and falls

into the welcoming blackness.

LOVELY AND WAITING FOR YOU

TERRY'S TOUGH N' TENDER

NOW

It is still night when she awakens to the sound of the door. "Daud?" she asks, and is

He is wrapped in a sheet and covered with blood. Jackstraw holds him up, panting, his neck

muscles straining. "Bastard," he says.

She picks Daud up like a child and carries him to her bed. His blood smears her arms, her

breasts. "Bastard went thatch," Jackstraw says. "I was only gone a minute."

Sarah arranges Daud on the bed and unwraps the sheet. A whimpering sound forces its way up her throat. She puts her hand to her mouth. Daud is striped in blood-the thatch must have used

some kind of weighted whip. Weakly, he tries to move, raises a hand as if to ward off a blow.

"Lie back," Sarah says. "You're at home."

Daud's face crinkles in pain. "Sarah," he says, and begins to cry.

Sarah feels tears stinging her own eyes and blinks them away. She looks up at Jackstraw.

"Did you give him anything?" she asks.

"Yeah. Endorphin. First thing."

"How much?"

He looks at her blankly. "Lots. I don't know."

"You weren't supposed to leave the next room," she says.

His eyes slide away. "It was a busy night," he says. "I was only gone a minute."

She turns her eyes back to Daud. "It took more than a minute for this," she says. "Get the

fuck out."

"It's not-"

There is a savage light in her eyes. She wants to tear him but she has other things to do.

"Get the fuck out," she repeats. He hesitates for another instant, then turns away.

She cleans the cuts and disinfects them. Daud cries silently, his throat working. Sarah

looks for his injector and finds it, loads it with endorphins from his cache, and guesses at a

dosage. She puts it in his arm, and he says her name and goes to sleep. She watches for a while,

making sure he hasn't taken too much, and then puts the covers over him and turns down the light.

"Just lie back," she says. "I've got the price of your ticket." She leans down to kiss his

beardless cheek. The bloody sheet goes in the trash.

Daud normally sleeps on the convertible sofa in the front room, and after making sure he

is asleep, she moves to the other room and, without bothering to open the sofa, lies down on it.

The room hums, and for a long while she listens.

TAMPA'S TOTALS OVERNITE, AS OF 8 THIS MORNING-TWELVE FOUND DEAD IN CITY LIMITS...LUCKY WINNERS

COLLECT AT ODDS OF 5 TO 3

The explosion has enough force to throw the sofa against the far wall. Sarah feels a hot

rush of wind that tears the breath from her throat, the elevator sensation of the world falling

away, and then a final impact as the wall comes up. Screams are ricocheting from every corner, all

the screams that Princess never uttered. There are fires licking like red laserlight.

She heaves herself to her feet and runs for the other room. She can see by the light of

the burning bed. Daud is sprawled in a corner of the room, and parts of his body are open and

other parts are on the walls. She is screaming for help, but alone she manages to get the burning

bedding through the hole in the wall. Outside, the hot tongues of morning are rising in the east.

She thinks she can hear Daud call her name.

BODY NEEDING WORK?

WE DELIVER

The ambulance driver wants payment in advance, and she opens her portfolio by comp and

transfers the stock without questioning the prices he gives her. Daud dies three times before the

driver's two assistants can get him out of the apartment, and each time they bring him back the

prices go up. "You got the money, lady, and he'll be fine," the driver tells her. He looks at her

nakedness with appreciative eyes. "All kinds of arrangements can be made," he says.

Later, Sarah sits in the hospital room and watches the doctors work and is told their

rates of payment. She will have to make plans to convert the endorphin quickly, within a few days.

Machines attached to Daud hiss and thump. The police surround her and want to know why someone would fire a shaped charge at her apartment wall from the building across the street. She tells them she has no idea. They have a lot of questions, but that seems to be the most frequent.

Eventually she puts her head in her hands and shakes her head; and they shuffle for a while and

then leave.

She wishes she had the inhaler: she needs the bite of hardfire to keep herself alert, to

keep her mind functioning. Thoughts hammer at her. If Cunningham's people had been in her

apartment, they would have known that she had slept in the back room, Daud in the front. They

waited till the lights went down and she had the time to get to sleep, then fired with a weapon

that would smash through the wall and scatter burning steel through the inside. They hadn't

trusted that she wouldn't tell someone or that she wouldn't try to use the pieces of knowledge she

had gained as leverage for some shifty little dirtscheme of her own.

Who would I tell?-she wonders.

She remembers Cunningham at that last moment in the Plastic Girl, the sadness in him. He

had known. Tried, in his way, to warn her. Perhaps the decision had not been his; perhaps it had

been made over his objection. What did the Orbitals care for one more dirtgirl when they had

already killed millions, and kept the rest alive only so long as they were useful currency?

The Hetman glides into the room on catlike feet. He wears a gold earring, and his wise,

liquid eyes are surrounded by the spiderwebs of the old hustler's dirtbound life. "I am sorry, mi

hermana," he says. "I had no indication it would come to this. I want you to understand."

Sarah nods numbly. "I know, Michael."

"I know people on the West Coast," the Hetman says. "They will give you work there, until

Cunningham and his people forget you exist."

Sarah looks up at him for a moment, then looks at the bed and the humming, hissing

machines. She shakes her head. "I can't go, Michael," she says.

"A bad mistake, Sarah." Gently. "They will try again."

Sarah makes no reply, feeling only the emptiness inside her, knowing the emptiness would

never leave if she deserted Daud again. The Hetman stands for an uncomfortable moment, then is

gone.

"I had the ticket," Sarah whispers.

their tickets, plugging into whatever can give them a fragment of their dream. All playing by

someone else's rules. Sarah has her ticket, but the rules have turned on her like a weasel, and

she must shred the ticket and spread it on the street, spread it so she can watch the machines hum

and hiss and keep what she loves alive. Because there is no choice, and the girls have no option

but to follow the instructions and play as best they can.

Chapter Three

As he stands in the hot summer of eastern Colorado, a steel guitar is playing a lonesome

song somewhere in the back of Cowboy's mind.

"For the laws I have a certain respect," he says. "For mercenaries I have none."

Arkady Mikhailovich Dragunov stares at him for a half second. His eyes are slitted against

the brightness of the sun. The whites seem yellowed Faberge ivory, and the irises, old steel

darkened like a sword. Then he nods. It's the answer he wants.

Discontent rises in Cowboy like a drifting wave of red sand. He doesn't like this man or

share his strange, suspicious, involuted hatreds. Excitement is tingling in his arms, his mind,

the crystal inside his skull. Missouri. At last. But Arkady is oblivious to the grandeur of what

is going to take place, wants only to fit Cowboy into place with his own self-image, to remind

Cowboy again that Arkady is not just a boss but the big boss, that Cowboy owes him not simply

loyalty but servitude. A game that Cowboy will not play.

"Goddamn right," Arkady says. "We know they're offering their services to Iowa and

Arkansas. We don't want that."

"If they find me, I'll do what I can," Cowboy says, knowing that in this business, talk is

necessarily elliptical. "But first they've got to find me. And my op plan should give me a good

chance of staying in the clear."

Arkady wears an open-necked silk shirt of pale violet, with leg-of-mutton sleeves so wide

they seem to drag in the dust; an embroidered Georgian sash wound twice around his waist; and

tight, polished cossack boots over tighter black trousers that have embroidery on the outer seams.

His hair, at intervals, stands abruptly on end and flares with static discharges, a different

color each time. The latest thing from the Havana boutiques of the Florida Free Zone. Cryo max, he

says proudly. Cowboy knows Arkady couldn't be cryo max if he spent his life trying; it isn't in

him. In fashion he is a follower, not a leader. Here he's just impressing the hicks and his

toadies.

Arkady is a big, brusque man, fond of hugging and touching the people he's talking to; but

he's got a heart like superconducting hardware and eyes to match, and it would be foolish to

consider him a friend. Thirdmen do not have cargo space for friends.

Arkady crimps the cardboard tube of a Russian cigarette and strikes a match. His hair

stands on end, suddenly bright orange. Imitating the match, Cowboy thinks, the steel guitar still

bending notes in his mind...

The Dodger, Cowboy's manager, strolls from where the panzer is being loaded for the run.

"Best make sure your craft is trimmed," the Dodger says.

Cowboy nods. "See you later, Arkady." Arkady's hair turns green.

"I could see you were getting impatient," the Dodger says as soon as they're out of

earshot. "Try not to be so fucking superior, will you?"

"It's hard not to be when Arkady's around."

The Dodger flashes him a disapproving look.

"He must have to butter his ass," Cowboy says, "to get into those pants." He can see the